


Black/White/Grey

by Blurble



Category: The Inheritance Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Multi, the slow road to relationship fix it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 02:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16296836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blurble/pseuds/Blurble
Summary: 1. It's reasonably obvious that the Inheritance world seriously needs Itempas and Nahadoth to figure things out for long-term stability and stuff, but N.K. Jemisin leaves a... lot... of blank space about how that would happen. I wrote this just to get it out of my head.2. I've read the omnibus, which is books 1,2,3,3.5. I haven't read the short stories.





	Black/White/Grey

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. It's reasonably obvious that the Inheritance world seriously needs Itempas and Nahadoth to figure things out for long-term stability and stuff, but N.K. Jemisin leaves a... lot... of blank space about how that would happen. I wrote this just to get it out of my head.  
> 2\. I've read the omnibus, which is books 1,2,3,3.5. I haven't read the short stories.

Nahadoth  _enjoys_ separating them. He watches, from underneath the coolness of the trees and in the shadows of a raven's feathers, as Itempas leaves. He doesn't look back even once at the mortal girl. His back is straight. His steps are certain. It is not true that Nahadoth has never hated him more than this moment. Nahadoth has hated him more, so much more. There are thousands of moments of hatred burned brighter than this one, seared into his flesh. 

Away from the house, well away, into the foothills and off to the city, Itempas falters. He breaks his stride, stops, recovers. The day is growing brighter, but the hills cast shadows still, and Nahadoth watches Itempas's shoulders begin to shake, and he is  _glad._

Later they will lose Sieh, and Itempas will weep, and Nahadoth will weep with him, and Yeine will point at the gathering storm in the skies that they must fight, and she will whisper to him that they need all Three of them to be strong now. Nahadoth will not say that he knows she's gone to Itempas already, and he will not scream that it is not enough.

He has not forgotten what Itempas, crying so pathetically now,  _did_ to Sieh. It is crocodile tears he sees, squeezed from a stone heart. But Yeine is right that for Their Children they need to be strong now. And Itempas, apparently, cannot be alone. There is a bitter irony to this antithesis, that makes Nahadoth grimly pleased and furious at the same time. But he agrees. They fight the maelstrom together. 

And then, as soon as it is contained, Itempas disappears. Fled into the arms of his- the demon girl, still a girl in godly terms but a very old mortal. Maybe they'll have ten years together, Nahadoth thinks. It's still too much. Too much happiness. When Nahadoth himself is a swirling black hole these days, is so much anguish and pain and despair he can barely hold himself together. He has not forgotten a single one of his dead children. He has not forgotten his worshippers' prayers. He has not forgotten staring down at the earth stone, watching what Itempas wrought, knowing that Itempas knew he would hear every one of the thoughts the mouthless man screamed at him. He has not forgotten.

Oh, he envies Yeine, who has so little to remember. And then he envies Enefa, who got to die. 

* * *

 

It starts from an impulse to defend, because Oree carries her family's fear of the Nightlord and with it a personal grudge, and Itempas wants her to _understand_ , that it is he who is broken and evil and vile, not Naha. He tells her in bits and pieces and he sees her horror with each one, but he can't stop. Once the floodgates have opened he cannot close them again, and it pours out in a stream of confession. There are wrongs he cannot catalogue. There are times he simply-- did not see, and did not notice. This is it's own, separate sin. Even in the depths of madness there were things he could not acknowledge about what he'd done-- was doing-- he looked away. But there was plenty he saw, enough for a lifetime of confessions.

They do not have a lifetime for this. They both know this. 

But he tells her everything he can, and she-

She holds his broken soul in her hands, and she doesn't throw it away. It is worse because it makes him love her more. 

"You have been a monster," she says, unflinching. "You have done tremendous evil and caused tremendous harm, and you can't take it back, and you can't make it go away. So you are just going to have to find a way to keep going."

He's trying. It is a delicate balance, trying to make the world a better place, while trying to keep it as untainted by his own filthy, blood-stained hands as he can manage.

When he throws himself against the maelstrom and feels pieces of himself peel away, it is the closest he has ever felt to penance, but then Yeine pulls him away and screams at him, and he can't, anymore, must be cautious where he wants to be self-destructive. It's not like he's blind, like he doesn't see how Naha is fraying at the edges, colors that can't exist bloating in the negative space of his shadows. Everyone knows the maelstrom is closest when Naha is there. 

"Sometimes," he tells Oree, holding her hand, which is soft and shriveled. It's a bad day again today, and she hasn't been able to get out of bed, and he wants to tell her comforting things, happy things, but he is a burning flame that destroys everything it touches. "Sometimes I scrub, and scrub, and scrub myself, but my skin comes off before the evil does."

Her eyes fill with tears and he hates himself.

"Oh, Shiny," she says. "You need to forgive yourself."

He can't help but recoil.

"How could I," he says. "I don't deserve-"

"You don't deserve forgiveness," she says. "But forgiveness isn't always about deserving."

He doesn't understand what she means. But like everything she says, he files it away, because he saves everything of her. He leans in to kiss her instead, her hands soft against his face. He doesn't deserve her either, but he has her, doesn't he?

* * *

She dies while he is away, busily stitching up the seams of the world. He missed her funeral. He didn't say goodbye before he left. 

He stands at her grave and realizes that the only person who has ever loved him completely, entirely as who he is, is gone forever. Never has he been this alone before. Not when Enefa and Nahadoth forgot him, not every second of the thousand years thereafter. 

He has loved Nahadoth entirely, but he and Nahadoth are opposite sides of a coin. Really, he realized this already Before-- could he have had the stormy nightmare of his jealousy so strongly if he hadn't already sensed the truth? Of course Naha was closer to Enefa than to him. There was something in Itempas impossible to accept. Their children together were nightmares-- nightmares he loved, but where was a better proof that between him and Naha there had always been a rift, a gap of understanding? In the passion between them there had been bright fire and intensity so addictive he'd never thought how badly he craved a gentleness he'd forgotten, entirely, how to access.

The more he'd sense it inside himself, the more he'd fought against it. The more he'd known his own unacceptableness the more he'd clung, and grabbed, and demanded, and the further apart that pushed them the more desperately he'd fought back. 

He sees this now for the first time.

And for the first time, he lets go.

* * *

 

Nahadoth feels it. It is like having his heart ripped out of his chest, unmistakable. 

There were the mad days at the beginning when he had ripped at his own flesh. And then Itempas had come, and anchored him, anchored him with a point inside his breast. Mine, Mine, Mine, the knot of wire in his soul declared, and it was stable and firm like everything Itempas made, and around it Nahadoth had flowed and changed and with that single point of stability he had never gone entirely mad again. 

Later it turned into a scourge, an inescapable thorn bleeding inside him. A thousand years in which his hatred had been stoked by it, the constant endless inescapable knowledge of Itempas's regard and need and hold on him. He'd picked at it like a bloody scab, fraying himself in the process.

It is gone. 

It is worse than Ea undoing something. 

It is --

He tries to hold on to something.

He-

There is a chaos in the universe. There is change. There is a shrieking nothing. He  has wanted-- He is free-- There is-- 

He doesn't know what happens for the next long while, a frantic battle he is barely aware of. Some instinct made him pull himself as far away from the world and Reality as possible, a desire to reduce collateral damage.

He is alone for the first time in a very, very long time.

There is no physical body with which he breathes, in, but a passing gas giant briefly dims.

He is a formless mass as he breathes, out.

And again.

And again.

* * *

 

It takes a very long time to return, and she is not the same as when s/he left. She is never the same, that is her nature, but this is a change more fundamental, and all her children feel it. 

Yeine holds her close and cradles her and presses her down because Yeine can sense when she needs that, and it is not enough, and she knows it, and she sees Yeine know it also. 

"It's still early," Nahadoth says, curled up on her side with her hair draped around her like a protective curtain. But the words have no conviction behind them, they are the echo of her former self.

"It's only one step," Yeine says, who doesn't understand that there is no such thing as bringing two magnets so close they almost touch and leaving them there with an infinite gap between them. But Nahadoth can't fight it anymore, and she doesn't want to. 

**Author's Note:**

> it seems like Shill's birth is meant to indicate The Three's reconciliation. As she is not monstrous she is presumably not a product of an Itempas/Nahadoth union, unless something has changed about the nature of such unions. I choose to believe the latter, only because it makes ends neater, and her birth more momentous.


End file.
